“Our love story and love for each other challenged all convention and taboo,” Janet said “The fact that we could hold hands in the U.S. Capitol and be married, that’s a testament to the great promise of this country,” Cohen said.

‘Love in Black and White’ William Cohen’s memoir is about love, bi-racial marriage and prejudice

Growing up in Bangor, Bill Cohen sometimes didn’t fit in.

The son of a Jewish father and an Irish mother, Cohen wasn’t Jewish enough for those at his Jewish school, but he was too Jewish for non-Jews.

It was kind of a “no-man’s land,” Cohen said. The son of a baker became a U.S. senator and U.S. secretary of defense. He recalled being warned when he first ran for office, “With a name like Cohen, you can’t get elected in Maine.”

Growing up in Indianapolis, Ind., his wife, Janet Langhart Cohen, also sometimes didn’t fit in.

The daughter of a devout Baptist single mother who cleaned houses for a living, she is a light-skinned African-American. At times, she was too black; other times, too white.

“I saw racism not in the sense of just black and white, but within the race – an intra-racism between blacks, the color coding of who’s lighter, who’s darker,” she said.

That sense of being neither fish nor fowl is one thing that drew the two together, they said.

She recalled in the play “Fiddler on the Roof” how a Jewish daughter wanted to marry outside her faith. “A bird may love a fish, but where will they make their home?” the father, Tevye, said. “I often think of Bill and me and think of Tevye and our coming together,” Janet said. “We’ve made a home.”

On Valentine’s Day, they will celebrate their 11th wedding anniversary, the same day that William S. Cohen’s latest book will be released.

“Love in Black and White” is his account of how the couple witnessed history and racism in America over three decades. The book also tells their histories, their love story, their pains and joys.

In a recent phone interview, Cohen and his wife said they consider their story a great example of how people from different backgrounds can came together.

“I wanted to draw some parallels showing how two people from different regions, races, religions, cultures could meet in this country and eventually marry and achieve success,” he said.

Marrying in a building slaves built

Feb. 14, 1996, the day Cohen and Langhart married, stands not only as a symbol of their love, but as a symbol of the nation’s progress over racism.

The couple met years earlier in Boston when Langhart, a television journalist, interviewed Cohen on her news show.

When they married, Cohen was in his last days of serving as a U.S. senator from Maine. At her suggestion, their wedding was held in the Capitol Building.

“To be married in the U.S. Capitol, the capitol that had been built on the backs of Janet’s ancestors, the backs of slaves, that was a very moving moment for us,” he said.

“Our love story and love for each other challenged all convention and taboo,” Janet said, “because not long before in our lifetime it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry.”

Thirty years before, such a wedding would have been illegal in many states, including Virginia. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws banning interracial marriages were unconstitutional.

“The fact that we could hold hands in the U.S. Capitol and be married, that’s a testament to the great promise of this country,” Cohen said.

Murder in Mississippi, anti-semitism in Maine

While their wedding is an example of one of their happiest days, “Love in Black and White” offers the Cohens’ revealing, personal stories of dark days, of injustice and of personal pain. The anti-semitism and violence against blacks are the “twin heads of racism” in the book, Langhart said.

Two events that especially affected her were the Mississippi murder of Emmett Till in 1955, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. King was a personal friend and mentor, she said. “Assassination is a fancy word for murder.”

Till was brutally murdered after a white store owner’s wife said the black boy whistled at her. Men came to his uncle’s home and dragged him out. They beat him, shot him, wired his body with a 100-pound factory fan and threw his remains in a river. Two men were later acquitted.

Janet was 14 at the time. The U.S. Supreme Court had recently ruled on “Brown vs. the Board of Education,” declaring segregation was illegal. “I was deciding whether I was going to go to an integrated school,” she said. She didn’t know Till, but the cruelty of his murder hurt, and how whites got away with it stung. “Because of that horrible murder and failure of justice, I decided I was going to an all-black school.”

When she was growing up in Indiana, black people didn’t have the full rights of Americans, she said. “We couldn’t vote in certain places, couldn’t sit in certain parts of the bus, couldn’t go to certain schools. There were limits for us.”

When he was growing up in Maine, Cohen saw a “No Jews” sign at a golf course, he wrote in the book. Playing sports, he recalls being jeered from the stands and called a “Jew bastard.”

Yet he wasn’t accepted by Jews in Bangor because his mother was Irish. In the synagogue, he felt alienated. After years of studying Hebrew history and religion, Rabbi Saul Brown did not consider Cohen Jewish enough to be bar mitzvahed, causing the boy to choke back tears as he told his father. “In response, I threw away the mezuzah I wore as a necklace,” Cohen wrote.

Later, when he decided to run for office, he ignored advice that with a name like Cohen, Mainers would not vote for him. “I thought once people listened to what I had to say they’d judge me on merit, not on what my name is.”

Racism ‘always out there’

In “Love in Black and White” Cohen wrote about his time at the Pentagon as secretary of defense, about the air strike he carried out in Kosovo, and how he and President Bill Clinton resisted pressure for a ground war.

His biggest regret as defense boss was the failure to kill Osama bin Laden in 1998, years before 9/11. By the time U.S. missiles hit Afghanistan, bin Laden was gone.

Cohen praised the military as a shining example of equality. “Individuals are promoted based on capabilities and character, not on color,” he said.

Unlike when Cohen and his wife were growing up, it’s no longer politically correct to be a racist. “White society has made great progress,” he said.

But recent examples – the drunken tirade against Jews by Mel Gibson, the on-stage, anti-black rants of comedian Michael Richards – show that it’s always out there, Cohen said. It’s important to understand, and to remember, what minorities in this country have endured.

He ends his book with a play his wife wrote. It features Till and Anne Frank talking about how he was killed because he was black, she because she was Jewish.

“What we have to do is make sure we don’t tolerate racism and allow it to take root and flourish,” Cohen said.

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